Baker Street

Baker Street takes its name from William Baker, a builder who laid out the street in seventeen fifty-five on land leased from the Portman Estate. While the name sounds like a reference to a trade, it instead commemorates a single man who helped transform these former fields into an elegant residential district for eighteenth-century Londoners. Over the centuries, the street evolved from a fashionable address for the elite into a bustling commercial artery, yet it retains a layout that has remained remarkably consistent since its original creation.